Tech —

ShapeShifter is Universal Binary

Themers rejoice!

What does it say about OS X that Windows users can effortlessly change the theme of their UI with the blessings of Microsoft, while Apple Computer gives Mac users two choices: Aqua and Graphite?

It says Steve Jobs is a control freak.

Luckily, there are people out there with brightly colored hair and numerous piercings that take poor grammar seriously. At Unsanity, "think different" is more than a collector poster on eBay, it's about letting the user have a say in the UI, and maybe making a buck off freedom of choice too. Since the switch to Intel, the Unsanity developers have been relentlessly developing their product catalog of haxies for Intel CPUs, but it wasn't until today that the most important—at least to me—haxie made the transition.

ShapeShifter 2.4 is finally out of beta, bringing stuff like what you see on the right to your Intel Mac. Despite being "just" a 0.1 release, this is a biggie - we've been in beta for seven and a half months waiting on a Rosetta fix, so I've had to entertain myself with filling in a lot of functionality holes in other places.

Besides being a Universal Binary, this release adds support for Unified window styles. What's that? Your favorite theme was made before Unified window styles existed? No problem - ShapeShifter will make it "just work".

A slight downside, ShapeShifter will now require 10.4, but de facto forced upgrades of OS X is all part of growing up and being a Mac user. Beside being UB, ShapeShifter has a number of enhancements, including support for iContainers of icons from CandyBar, and guiTweak has also been updated for the anal retentive themer. ShapeShifter v2.4 sells for $20.

In case you hadn't guessed, I use ShapeShifter. I have been running the beta for about a month without a problem, but it will be nice to have the official release. That's Good Grey, my favorite theme, but no matter the theme—death to brushed metal!